thanks for thenworthless advice slack

Lol.

I have about a thousand hours running a bow stamblade in pvp. Right now there are a couple of configurations...they’re all really close in efficiency.

Marksman + hawks eye + 1kragh: this offers insane damage and massive resource efficiency. I tend to run this. A fully buffed opening snipe...Grim focus, rally, magelight (for might of the guild), snipe...this can hit an unprepared opponent for 15k, so no, bow ganking isn’t dead, lol. The downside to this configuration is that bows are the only available weapons, so you have to give up one of the set buffs on the back bar. You could use a maelstrom or master greatsword, but just a random sword should work fine too.

Marksman is the top performer and is probably the primary set for a bow build. Other secondary set options:

Hundings Rage: (or Spriggans, which should,perform almost the same). I’d guess this underperforms Hawks a bit, but probably not much. You're exchanging 5% bow damage for weapon damage and some max stam for crit. Hundings is a little more attractive to me if your crit is under 60%. That’s a sort of tipping point, where damage output gets better by adding buffs other than more crit. In other words, if a toon has 35% crit, adding a crit buff produces more damage than a weapon damage buff. But if that toon is at 60% crit already, the Damage buff is more effective. At any rate, it’s a decent second set.

Morag Tong: I think this is the current max damage bow gank combo, especially if you don’t need addl crit from the second set. It offers three damage-boosting buffs, then 10% more damage from poison damage abilities. That’s huge. The tool tip is a bit confusing, so note that a direct damage hit (which is most everything you’ll be using) procs a boost to ALL damage from a poison ability. So the ticks on poison inject get the boost. You can also

The big con for me is that you will need to take the poison morph of snipe. The poison status effect of this will pull you out of sneak for a while after the hit...it can make stealthing away after a gank difficult.

Automaton: 400 weapon damage to physical damage abilities. This is good for focus aim...and although I haven’t tested it should make a fully buffed ballista hit like a truck.

Alchemist: probably a top dps option...I’m going to guess the top damage configs are Morag, alchemist, then hawks eye in descending order.


Shadow walker: this is a tough question. Marksman is the best bow set, but it focuses heavily on regen and cost reduction, which you don’t need with Walker. I’d lean Morag or Hundings with walker. The main concern with walker is whether you can get enough power to execute a target before they heal and buff up. It’s worth a shot, but if you don’t feel powerful enough you might try something else. Marksman and hawkseye reduce cost so much that I don’t really need the regen.

I like the idea of archers mind...let me know how it goes. A +15% crit bonus from sneak should be one of the most powerful buffs in the game.

I honestly haven’t tested the numbers in a while on Nirn vs sharp. In general from what I’ve read Nirn and sharp still perform within 1% of one another. However, pvp can create some odd scenarios. The sharpened doesn’t help your heals or any non-damage abilities, while nirn can. And sharp doesn’t help with damage shields, while Nirn can. However, sharp can cut through the armor resistances a lot of players stack. I should test now that I can transmute a marksman bow to Nirn.

I like the warrior or the shadow. Which offers more depends on your crit rating. But I’ve seen test runs putting out 3 million damage using all three damage mundus and the dps comes in razor-thin close, like a range of 32,500 to 32,700. Of course if Shadow plus archers mind crit stacks, that would be big (no idea, and too late tomdo the research, lol).

Something else for your build...you might want your crit rating off the charts considering the set buff. I do that as well, running a little leaner on the attack bar than Alcast. Along w snipe and poison inject I slot relentless focus and piercing mark. The last button I’ll try to get another Assassin skill for even more crit...or sacrifice it and run cammo hunter. Moving all the Assassin skills to the attack bar helps with crit, but makes the rotation a little clunky. (Rally, bar swap, relent focus, swap, magelight, swap, snipe...it’s not as bad as it sounds). The build is very specialized. You assist from cover, you gank, you run or you die. Lol.